Because we're still alive and also have a future and if the goal is to help people, there is no reason to draw the line at "paid it off already" when money is fungible and can still be used to secure a more comfortable future. Having paid off debts doesn't mean you climbed out of the hole, it means you did the responsible thing when you could have easily stashed the money away for your own retirement.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help people like us, who already paid off large sums of loans. I'm asking why we should only help people still saddled with debt if we also help people like us at the same time. That's classic crab mentality.
> it means you did the responsible thing
Not all fields are lucrative enough that paying off a pile of loans is even feasible. With how college is often pushes as all but required for many kids, it isn't possible to make an informed decision.
They catch up by distilling frontier models. They will eventually figure out how to prevent that from happening. No one has any interest in investing tens of billions if the product can be copied and sold for less.
Where are the competitive models from Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, Canada, India, the UK? From anywhere that isn't China or the US?
There are none. Mistral Small 4 is pareto-competitive in its pricing bracket at $0.15/$0.60, at worst it's second to Gemma 4 26B A4B. The above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so.
This particular Mistral Medium looks to be uncompetitive at that pricing. I'm surprised it's so expensive given its size. Wonder if we'll see other providers offer it for cheaper.
but that doesn't mean Mistral has never produced anything useful.
You mentioned "pareto-competitive", and EXAONE certainly was that. The statement that the "above countries have never had a model that is even close to being so" is simply too broad.
You're talking about EXAONE 4.5 33B? Gemma 4 31B was released 1 week earlier and blows it out of the water. Which point in time/model size are you possibly talking about? The original K-EXAONE in January?
More than anything the availability speaks for itself. If it was indeed pareto competitive, all dozens of model providers would be doing their best to offer it for serverless inference. They don't. There's maybe one that does. Do you think a lot of companies wouldn't prefer a Korean model over a Chinese one? In this case, the market speaks. Go talk to people who run business based on putting billions or trillions of tokens through open weights models. And how much time they put into optimization of model selection to save money and latency. And ask why none of them are using EXAONE models. It's not because we're not aware of their existence. There's also reason to believe they've been benchmaxxing more than Chinese models, btw. Have you done the vibecheck?
I wish they were strong, I hope that in the future, they are. More diversity is better. So far they have not yet been a serious option at any point.
Without Google’s funding its not obvious i DeepMind would have went anywhere.
Unless the moved to US for funding while keeping a back office in the UK.
It’s strange to expect anything significant to come out from Europe when VCs there are either very risk averse and/or don’t have enough cash to begin with. It’s not like government or EU funding can replace that since its almost always wasted or missdirected
It’s a company containing such remarkable talent that I’m sure they would not have run into significant issues raising capital on international markets.
It’s not like VCs are only allowed to invest in companies in their own country.
Although the Manus decision might change things for AI, Singapore-washing is quite rampant among Chinese companies, so I wouldn't call this place of origin an alternative market.
Yes, but it would seem that Chinese models are much more efficiently trained than the US ones, (i.e. with fewer resources).
Europe doesn't invest nowhere near as much as the US does into tech, so we need to either figure out how to be at least as, and hopefully more, efficient as the Chinese models are (at least in terms of training) or there's little point in trying.
I suspect this is one of the reasons why Mistral's models are somewhat struggling; i.e. US style training costs, but nowhere near as much cash as OpenAI/Anthopic have.
There are multiple European Google alternatives as well for example, but being 80% as good just doesn't cut it. Chinese models win because they are 95-98% as good as the SotA US ones but at a fraction of the cost.
A few months ago China was being criticized left and right on how somehow it was not able to compete, and once DeepSeek showed up then all the hatred shifted onto how China was actually competing but exploring unfair competitive advantages.
Funny how that works.
Also, aren't the likes of OpenAI burning through over $2 of investment for each $1 of revenue?
2 businesses working to get money from the same customers in the same field is competition. Kellogs is competing with store brand cereal. People are choosing to use these Chinese AI apis because they are good enough for some workflows and cheaper. If they didn't exist, the money would go to the frontier labs. There is no world where this would not be defined as competition.
I find it funny how people don't realize the technical achievements and papers coming out of deepseek or Alibaba. They are making this whole AI thing sustainable and cheap and available to do at home. That's the future. I should be able to run my own harness and model and never bother with openai or anthropic at all.
Qwen3.6 runs on a single GPU and beats claudes sonnet. In benchmarks and real world tests from humans. Kimi is awesome but most people won't be able to host it themselves.
A lot of people are slowly realizing the moat of 1T closed source models is gone as of the last few weeks. It's going to change the industry. April was a huge month for open models, it'll be curious to see if that continues.
This Mistral submission is another nail in the coffin.
> China is not competing, it is distilling US models.
I think you should check your notes. The likes of Kimi K2 thinking shows up as high as the second best general purpose model currently in existence. It seems they compete just fine.
If you believe "distilling" is all it takes to put together a model at the top of any synthetic benchmark then I wonder what you would have to say about all US models that greatly underperform in comparison and still manage to be used extensively in professional settings.
But your argument is an emotional one and not rarional, isn't it?
According to benchmarks which are gamed to the extreme these days. Trusting them blindly isn’t exactly rational either. They don’t necessarily translate that well to real world tasks
It’s obviously not “distilling” as such but there are reasons why Chinnese models are consistently several months behind OpenAI/Antropic
The fact that this comment is still up hours later but my comment below participating in the discussion got flagged should tell one everything they need to know about the intellectual rigor here.
I don't mind Chinese but US under Trump is a fascist state based on ethnic and theological grounds pretty much or soon would be if electorate doesn't decide otherwise.
China and rest of the world has sane leadership that aren't mentally retarted.
I would rather support Chinese tech companies then American ones who write manifestos, bomb children, praise wwii Germany, can't stay online, are publicly making weapons for wars I don't support, etc.
Chinese AI companies are just trying to make money. They are also publicly contributing to forward the field. We all get to decide, but claiming deepseek is involved in genocide is beyond a stretch. Claiming anthropic and chatgpt are... Actually not so much given the president was threatening it and enabling it with an ally...
$14B "empire" next to a trillion dollar OpenAI, trillion dollar Anthropic, trillion dollar DeepMind... this is a massive failure, not an empire. It is truly baffling how low expectations are for European tech.
I love the implication that this paper just dropped out of thin air and not decades of private AI research funded by a US company.
>The Chinese made it public, among other things to show how fragile this is as a business
The Chinese distill US models, that's why they keep trailing close but never exceeding. It's easy to make things public when you didn't take on any of the cost of developing the technology. Stealing US IP and selling cheap copies has been China's MO for decades now.
There is not such a thing. That's the point. Everyone is welcome on the internet, where information wants to be free. I still believe that, even if it is no longer fashionable.
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